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captainsblogSomeday, after the fall of Gilead, or the Confederation, or whatever follows us, future Margaret Meads will pick through the written wreckage that remains after the dropping of the bombs and the EMF pulses. Perhaps they will come upon a deeply buried “top lap” with screenshot pages making strange references to “beers” and “smiths,” indecipherable abbreviations like MCWA and TMP, and, somehow, a collection of received knowledge on every subject except, for some reason, math.
It will be the lost story of a place called Learned League, and nobody will understand it. Unless, unless. As the composer and lost mathematician Tom Lehrer once said, “I feel that if any songs are going to come out of World War III we'd better start writing them now.” Alas, I am not the scribe for the world of LLamas. I’ve neither the length or breadth of knowledge. Instead, I will place these words in the lead-coated time capsule to carry us back to an even older time and online place. Where, on a barely batteried Gateway 2000 running Windows 95, some researcher in the mud will find a hard disk of similar confusion. The references there, to “lems” and “grums,” the photos of flags of Burkina Faso and of a skunk named Gertie, and the abbreviation that they might, just might recognize?
AOL.
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From the later 1990s through the early oughts, America Online was a home for hundreds of people seeking knowledge, kindred spirits and just plain fun. The format that became familiar to us originated outside the future walled garden of that name, per a brief history by someone I never knew there named CarlosDeV: "The Mercury Center trivia group was one of the first online social groups revolving around trivia games. Founded by the infamous Dr. Gone, it ran first as a part of Mercury Center and was later absorbed into AOL as Triviana.”
I did interact a few times with The Infamous Dr. Gone (one uses one’s full name out of respect, yo), but had most of my online experience in a different set of officially sanctioned AOL trivia chatrooms under the banner of “Trivia Forum.” Yet others came via one styled “Amazing Trivia.” There was limited cross-pollination of the groups, because the formats across all of them were essentially the same: official Community Leaders (CLs), two to a room, would run and scorekeep prewritten games lasting typically 60 or 90 minutes. Though both had “HOST” in their on-duty screennames, the leader running the game was designated as THE “host” for the session, the other as scorekeeper (“skeep” in the parlance.)
Programs with names like Trivhost and Trivtool circulated in the ether and were used to write the games to run in that pre-HTML language of the AOL Garden called Rainman; to run and score them in the rooms; and to post logs of their text and results. Scores were kept, results and records archived, prizes consisted entirely of respect and admiration for winners.
Most games were general knowledge based, with notable exceptions. A Saturday night Pop Culture game, run by two of the future mainstays of the Mental Floss website, was one of the longest running and hardest to gain entry to; all AOL chat rooms had limits on how many could attend, and there were also limits on connectivity in the bad old dialup days. So if you wanted to be sure of getting in, you’d have to get there ridiculously early, potentially pay $2.95 an hour for the privilege, and stay active so you didn’t get "rate limited" out for inactivity. Other games focused on music and/or lyrics. Still others rewarded creativity; two common variants were “Fast and First” and “Correct and Creative,” where you got more points for being first with a correct answer but could still get something for the first unique incorrect one. Most questions in all games, other than these one-offs, awarded you one point, but a single correct answer would be scored three times that as the much-sought “triple.”
That, in turn, led to other terminology. Just as Jeopardy! players must learn buzzer skills, players in these forums would often try to time a known correct answer to come close to the buzzer, fending off other players from seeing it and copying it to increase their own chances of a “triple.” The sight of 20-odd players finally seeing the right answer and copying led to the practice being called “lemming,” after the debunked Disney-filmed sight of such animals following each other over a cliff. “Lem” became the non-lunar verb and noun form. Another despised tactic was the “grum,” named in dishonor of an early-day player with a screenname like GRUMBLR. That was a defensive trick in which the “grummer” would deliberately post a plausible but wrong answer in hopes of taking as many players over the cliff with them.
All of this was done in real time, usually with a halftime break for interim scores to be posted. The CL in charge of “hosting” would load the game which they usually (but not always) wrote, cue up each question, designate the stop time with a displayed BUZZER, and then turn things over to the skeep, who would decide on the fly who was right and for how many points. Witty banter ensued during the skeeping process, until the scores were finalized with the trivia-exclusive term “GOTTEM.”
Those were the games themselves, usually a “nooner” eastern and then a schedule in each forum nightly from 8ish to 11ish, some starting in later time zones. Between games, there’d be just chat in the chat rooms among the “triviots” as we were known in our forum. Alex Trebek used the term with one of our players who made it to the podium during the second-segment chat once, and that got reduced to a “wav” file among the hundreds that players could download and then launch in the room using the Rainman code {S ) Many of us remain friends with hundreds of people met there. Some married each other after meeting in these rooms (“M&Ms”). Others broke up, took out restraining orders on each other and worse. Smart people aren’t known for their social skills, after all. But even closer bonds formed among the CLs who were never paid, except in kind, for the work they put into this process, and that lack of payment is what eventually brought the whole sanctioned AOL trivia world to a sudden halt.
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The “walled garden” model of online interaction was much maligned, but after 20 years of almost unfettered twittering and worse, maybe it was an idea which had its time come too soon. AOL took great lengths to ensure the safety and comfort of the online experience that people then, and even some now, paid a monthly fee and even big connection and phone charges to access. A big part of that was the Community Leader program. There were similar functions in other designated areas of the service, but for us it was mostly the people running and scoring the games.
CL. The first two letters of Club, as in Fight, which you know the first and second rules of. Likewise, the n00bs in the rooms only heard rumors and got limited answers about things: What does HOST mean before your name and why can’t I pick one starting with that? Can they really kick you out of a chat room ? What’s a GCHost and why does everybody get real nervous when one enters a room? What’s the capital of Burkina Faso?
As every triviot knows for that last one, it’s Ouagadougou. Knowledge of the rest came over months of discreet chatroom and instant message discussion. When a yute seemed possessive of potential for the Force, they’d be invited to apply for CL status. I forget what this entailed: academic or chat transcripts, essay questions, killing a guy at Yahoo maybe. Eventually, though, came a Blue Envelope AOL Official Mail: you’d been initially approved and were given your Alpha Omega Lambda name. I think HOST Game Ray was already taken, so I took a variant. Then you went to school. In chat rooms. Cornell Hall, Yale Hall, Berkeley Hall, Utter Pretentious Hall, Monty Hall. These were nonspecific to trivia, but concerned crowd control, watching out for minors and them wot might prey on them, how to deal with disruption and anger. After weeks of these, you finally “graduated” and got your magical powers: free access to the site (can’t remember if it was just in HOST clothes or if all names on your account were comped), and the chatroom “tool” to “gag” a disruptive member. CLs went away almost 20 years ago and the tools no longer worked, but damn if I don’t remember the command in Rainman:
=q permagag [username] [duration 1-30]
(Points to anyone who can explain why I remember that and not where I put my wallet 20 minutes ago.)
Of course the thing was oxymoronic, since there was nothing perma about it; a fixed number of minutes was tops. Also, apropos of the Fight Club connection, you were absolutely verboten to threaten a member with it or even say in or out of the room that you had the tool to do it. The gagged member would continue to see their text in their own chat screen; smarter ones would realize nobody was engaging with it and might have put the 2 with the 2.
With the great power came great responsibility. Volunteer schmolunteer, this was a job in every respect other than the getting paid for it part. If you were on the schedule, you were expected to be there, ahead of time, with your game ready if hosting and the software loaded for either task. Never mind that half the room was off-duty CLs who could step in with one of 500 old games to do. Officially, the sanctions were simple and rare: you could be pulled off your time slot for a week or a forever, and in the worst case, a Blue Envelope could strip you of your medals. It was rare because the unofficial sanction was far more effective: Shunning By Triviot. Some understood that your job, or your sick, or your kid might preclude it on a given day, but enough would take umbrage that it was clear…. This was Just Not Done.
You could also get the boot for causing, or ignoring, Terms of Service violations while in host clothes. A member could narc on you, but the more common way was the random arrivals in a room by a GC Host. That stood for Games Channel, of which we were officially a part, and that meant less trivial, more juvenile things going on in other places. They were unofficially known as the TOS Cops, had their senses of humor surgically removed in Clockwork Orange Hall, and enforced not only the letter of the TOS but the persnicketies of them. Spoonerisms like “duck my sick” to avoid profanity? You’d get a warning. Not saying something when n00b11368 did the same thing? The host could be written up. They all seemed nice; probably all got jobs with ICE or TSA after it all went to shit.
Which gets us to,…. How and why it all went to shit.
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As with most things, you can blame the damn lawyers. Specifically, the lawyers in Hallissey, et al v. America Online, Inc., et al, 1:99-cv-03785-KTD (SDNY 1999). Ex HOST Kelly was one of a soon to be class of then and former CLs who sued Steve Case and Company, alleging that the “volunteers” were really employees and should have been paid wages and even overtime in accordance with the US Fair Labor Standards Act. At some point in my own tenure, I think I got notice that I was a member of the class and could opt out, file a claim, or do nothing. Despite general disdain for these things, I went with B, because “it’s always C!” was one of our joke answers.
Then came another blue envelope. Whether because of this, or a related Labor Department investigation, AOL running-manned up and did what it thought was the right thing to do: it fired each and every one of us. The program, the tools, the official obligations, poofed a few weeks later. Wikipedia even documents it, if you believe that as a source: In late May 2005, AOL informed its Community Leaders that they would be released from their positions on June 8 of that year. AOL offered volunteers 12 months of free service in compensation for their services. While many Community Leaders left the service after this announcement, others stayed with AOL and continued their efforts at building community, albeit in an unofficial role.
Lovely parting gifts. Thanks for playing.
That “unofficial role” bit? I can confirm that to be true. Some hosts took offense to either the result or the ham-handedness of the way AOL did it, and took their games and went home. I actually took over the coveted Saturday night pop culture slot with a still-friend. It was never as good. Other games carried on as long as AOL itself did, which in its then-form wasn’t long.
For there were bigger things going on. The AOL-Time Warner merger, the Ishtar of corporate acquisitions. The advent of web-based social media. And that thing Steve Jobs put in your pocket which has either never left or was secretly replaced by an Android. America was still On Line, but not there. Innovations like instant messaging, the buddy list and even our own beloved chat rooms all fell, one by one. After years of mailing us floppies and CDs with their latest version upgrades, the last desktop version was 9.0 and I installed it in Windows XP days. By now, I was seeing most friends from There through blogging or on Facebook. AOL itself went through numerous failed marriages and adoptions, through things you never heard of like Bebo and things you have like Yahoo and Verizon. It’s now just a pretty site that will still send you your email and nag you about PC tuneups.
For a time, the rooms and the games still existed there, and you could play if you ponied for the “AOL Gold” version of their desktop software. Their main income source, dialup access, dried up years before with broadband, although there are probably millions of grandpas still paying $23 a month for it when they don’t even have a landline. Some old friends from there soldiered on until finally, a year or so ago, AOL finally pulled the last plug. Chat rooms were no more.
They’ve found an alternative dealer for their fix. I don’t know what it’s called, but it allows hosts to host and skeeps to score and GOTTEMs to be gotted. There’s also a Facebook group which relives memories of these games, as well as the in-person “bashes” (I attended a handful from Boston to Myrtle Beach) where triviots would pay for airfare and hotel rooms to sit inside in a smoke-filled lounge and play the same trivia games they played at home.
It's only mostly dead. But, as we know, mostly dead is slightly alive! Even more alive are the friendships made, the memories preserved, the knowledge gained. Because where would you be in life if you suddenly were faced with death and knowing the capital of Burkina Faso would save you?
Ouagadougou to you, too😉
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Date: 2022-05-21 11:10 pm (UTC)Which has to be said twice in order for it to be real. (Cabin Pressure rules)